Rich Rant

Every Moment is a Breath / Every Breath is a Word / Every Word is Love / Every Love is Now / Every Now is Everything

[richrantferguson]

Maps

Maps charting states of denial can’t be trusted for long. Better to get your hands on one offering a state-of-the-art way of being, a tried-and-true fortified state of the union. Even a state of flux offers insight and delight when you’re free to travel between one place and another. Forked roads may induce a state of inertia, but only briefly, once laissez-faire is reminded it’s only riding…

[richrantferguson]

Cloud Dreaming

While lying in the park, I admire the clouds above. Never mind that they resemble enormous cotton balls in the sky’s blue hospital; they speak amongst themselves, wondering which shapes I most resemble. One says I look like a dinosaur. Another, a rolling hill. Still another, a dog with wings. I want to call out, tell them I’m just another human enjoying the day. Instead, I remain silent, let…

[richrantferguson]

Wanda Coleman

For breakfast, I have coffee and two scoops of Wanda Coleman. While strolling through the neighborhood, a murder of crows studies me with coal eyes that remember and whisper, “Wanda Coleman.” At a freeway entrance ramp, a man holds a sign asking for change; I offer him a five and a copy of Wanda Coleman. As the sun slow-walks across the sky, I visit a fortuneteller whose every prediction…

[richrantferguson]

When the Dead Letter Office Calls

The sky is teaching my daughter how to write cloud haikus, and I am in talks with Hollywood bigwigs to rewrite all of Monday’s failed movie scripts. The neighbor across the way grunts and growls in Neanderthal video-game speak and has a dog whose native tongue is bark all day. The cosmic conductor bangs on my door, threatening to cancel my train of thought as the dead letter office keeps…

[richrantferguson]

While waiting for the hour of peace to strike the clock

I witness hollow politicians lip-syncing to the sounds of falling bombs. A fortune cookie warns it’s not a good idea to hire a skunk as your aromatherapist. A woman, moonlighting as a metaphor for the moon when it’s drained of borrowed light, comforts a bullet-toothed man who plays double or nothing with his last pocketful of luck. While waiting for the hour of peace, broken pianos abandon…

[richrantferguson]

A verb versed in the history of how humans learned to encode action, time, and possibility

seeks quiet, but rebellious adjective that may agree or disagree with nouns. A non-intersective adjective, as in an alleged crime or former friend. Moodiness and occasional bouts of depression, okay. So too, an adjective that shifts meaning by position— the reliability of a responsible person versus the guilt of a person responsible. Looking for quick cashiers, slim hipsters, and pragmatic…

[richrantferguson]

An Eraser Big Enough for Misspelled Skywriting

Leave it to a sunny day to turn a boring chord progression into a bright war against imperialism. A day that shimmers you pearl-promised, tranced in rays of purple unhazed, unfazed by the boom of doomsday’s drums. Leave it to a sunny day to steam your third eye clean, to make you feel so far out you can hear the stars sneeze. On a sunny day, no need to have an eraser big enough to correct the…

[richrantferguson]

Beneath a full moon of funeral jazz

the city breathes in 4/4. A trumpet bell aimed at sky calls down stars as a busted streetlight asks for a last cigarette before the firing squad. Indigo, ash, neon blur. A last train home and blue lullabies in dark alleyways whispering tales of tenderness without apologies or regret. Up and down these brass-knuckled streets, people live through doubt, survive rust. Breathe in cheer. Speak a…

[richrantferguson]

Dream Dressing

It was the day when people dressed up in their hopes and dreams and threw a party. Many wished for world peace or lavish fortunes. Others carried quieter, heavier wants: a Cincinnati accountant longed to be a Parisian pastry chef; a man prayed for his wife to be cancer-free; a transgender youth yearned to be understood and accepted by their parents; a brokenhearted mother ached for the warm…

[richrantferguson]

Our diction is stubbornly coiffed and cowlicked

educated by dog-eared books, Billboard hits, and tea-leaf predictions. We witness the faces of our neighbors in clouds, tree trunks, burnt tortillas. Instead of breathing in the fumes of old regrets or heckling the possibility of redemption, we place the voices of our higher selves into the mouths of cops, true-crime podcasters, weary Walmart greeters. As if we’re no longer condemned to…

[richrantferguson]

Once upon a nowadays day like today

earth, fire, air, and water trade elemental blows while the masses surge forward and backward like an eight-day clock. Good fortune waits just beyond the shadow of a cross-eyed cross as raucous radio stations sweet-talk cities with searing sonic sway. Bright ideas burn, then get banned by the loathsome elite. Headlines cry the unreal estate market is soaring while citizens are shoved to the…

[richrantferguson]

A Trip, Dip, Slip-Slide of the Tongue

Don’t heave-ho the get-up-and-go. Just heavyweight. Heavy the wait until you’re sure you’re light on your feet. Hopscotch. Don’t dodge the logic. Log. Ick. Don’t jump in the deep end if you can’t swim. A metaphor is as deep or shallow as its maker dreams it to be. But even if you have little currency or current seeds growing in the brain trust, it’s never too late to learn all the ways an ill…

[richrantferguson]

Praiseworthy Ups

Praiseworthy ups to all the pregnant pauses birthing real conversations. To humanity’s bountiful soil, forever blooming new becomings. To the boot-scuffed voices of the rough and ready, scar-mapped karmas, but ready to make things right. Praiseworthy ups to bullets that become sunflower seeds rather than learn the dark grammar of gun barrels. To beauty that makes its own rules, Goodwill chic…

[richrantferguson]

This Land

This land of struggle and unity is a land of ash. This land of rage and reconciliation is a land of awakening. Stories of grace and discrimination, disease and regeneration keep cycling through history. Will the guns and powers that bleed ever wake one another from their violent sleep? This land of perish, this land of promise. Land of blood, land of love. Right now, what do we hold in our…

[richrantferguson]

What the Headlines Don’t Say

You don’t have to choose between up or down, Apple or Android, heaven on earth or an all-expense-paid weekend getaway to Dante’s Inferno. Before us, countless possibilities: an array of sounds and signals, enough chances to compose the hold music for anyone slow in making decisions, or who may ghost you in the future. Eventually, you realize time is an animal: it either wants its claws in…

[richrantferguson]

The Blue Sky Above

Only wishes us peace. Doesn’t want to steal our savings, or keep us up all night while watching Instagram reels of drum solos and physical comedy. Isn’t a sad psalm or Oppenheimer’s bomb. Not the Hantavirus or Tantalus on a tirade.  It’s a CPR for the blues. Doesn’t lip sync to the sounds of sirens or fingernails on chalkboards. The blue sky will gladly take out all your mental…

[richrantferguson]

The Universal

A car I once had failed on me because the tires ate the exhaust pipe. After that, I had four wheels that coughed constantly, sometimes sputtering smoke into the air. Then the rearview mirrors ingested the tires, and though I could still see far behind me, the journey forward became slow going.  Next, the seats consumed the rearview mirrors; the drive shaft devoured the seats. The taillights…